Doubtless many readers saw the recent article in the New York Times, profiling Katherine Russell Rich, author most recently of a book called Dreaming in Hindi — a memoir of a year spent in Rajasthan, learning Hindi.
Something about the article in the Times bugged me, starting with the following passage:
One store owner insists in English that she is not actually speaking Hindi; when Ms. Rich explains, in Hindi, that she studied the language for some time in Rajasthan, he retorts, in English, “They don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan.†(This happens not to be true.)
When Ms. Rich returned to New York from abroad, she spontaneously spoke Hindi to a friend of a friend. “He told me that when I spoke Hindi to him, it was like a body blow,” Ms. Rich said. “I think to Indians, sometimes it feels like I’m eavesdropping on a private conversation, like I’m breaking the fourth wall.” (link)
Wait, couldn’t it also be that the people Rich has been accosting, taxi drivers and convenience store clerks, might simply find this persistent American annoying, and have refused to speak Hindi with her mainly to make her go away? Lady, I’m sorry if your being in New York means your newly-acquired Hindi is going to start getting rusty. But I got a job to do, and that involves speaking English to patrons as I sell them stuff, not teaching you how to pronounce “lajawab” correctly. Next in line, please?
The question has to be asked: why does Katherine Russell Rich want to learn to speak Hindi? Is it to communicate with Hindi speakers while living in India? That would be a perfectly fine reason, indeed, an admirable one. But I suspect that sadly her real desire was to a) get paid for writing a book where she can talk all about her Hindi lessons and her impressions of Rajasthan, only to b) promptly move back to Manhattan, where she’ll irk Hindi speaking New Yorkers with her persistent demands that they speak Hindi with her?
Another annoyance in the article is the presumption that people refuse to acknowledge a white woman who speaks Hindi because we desis like to gossip about Americans in our secret language:
To some people from India, Ms. Rich learned, it is insulting to be addressed in anything other than English, a language of the privileged. And for some immigrants, domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim. (link)
I really don’t know where the author of the article got this idea. (Why not ask an actual Indian, Hindi-speaker before making the speculative statement that “domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim”?)
Finally, there is the obligatory dis on second-generation, “heritage” students who take Hindi classes at their universities:
“A lot of Indians who were born here or moved here when they were very small want to rediscover the language,†he said. (Ms. Rich said that she had overlapped with such students at New York University, and that many were already proficient in the language, less interested in their heritage and more interested in an easy A.) (link)
I’ll have you know, Ms. Rich, that most second gen, Indian-American college students do not take Hindi for this reason. I myself took Hindi at Cornell, and my professor gave me a “B” in intermediate Hindi (I deserved it, but it still smarts: certainly not an “easy A”).
In fact, most Indian-American college students actually take Hindi to meet, and flirt with, other Indian-American college students. So there.Katherine Russell Rich has also produced a short, promotional YouTube video related to the book and this New York Times article, which as of this writing has had all of 127 hits, even with a link from the New York Times:
If you weren’t annoyed by Katherine Russell Rich before, I suspect you may be by now.
Katherine Russell Rich also has an amusing, but not exactly wonderful, first-person story about making out with a New York City fireman in an elevator here.
Correctly defined, a Bhasha is a major language, and Boli is a minor language or a dialect (as in Khariboli, the standard Hindi dialect). However, the language spoken around the Braj region is popularly called Braj Bhasha. Very sweet dialect, and quite old too. It is the language of Bhakti sangeet and many songs used in North Indian classical compositions. As far as I am aware, there is no significant element of Bengali in the language spoken in Braj region.
Braja bhasha existed in Braj before all the Bengali ex-pats (Gaudiya Vaishnavas) came to live there (as it is a holy place to them). After large numbers of bengalis started living in the region and writing poetry there, Braj boli, a genre of poetry and dialect that reflected that, grew. And it goes both ways – you will find a type of hybrid language in some of the Vaishnava poetry that is written in West Bengal (maybe Bangladesh) too (some Braj bhasha words being incorporated into primarily bengali poetry.
This hybrid is precisely because of the Braj influence on the Bengalis (via Gaudiya Vaishnavism) and the Bengali influence on the people of Braj (due again to the sect and the large numbers of Bengalis who migrated to Braj because of the sect).
There are however, other Vaishnava sects in and around the Braj region that are not Bengali oriented, and those are the sangeets that you have probably been exposed to.
Ah, okay!
I had been scratching my head for the past few months trying to figure out how a gori got so fluent in both Hindi and Bengali.
I mean, if you had been in Kolkata, then you would have been familiar with Bengali but not so much with Hindi. And in other parts of India, you would not have picked up Bengali.
Also your knowledge of the etymology of the language showed some formal training, and I couldn’t figure out where you would have picked up both Hindi and Bengali to the point of using them like a native.
As you can tell from commenters on this site, many ABDs don’t pick up the “mother” (or desi) tongue at all, and if they do, they have only pick up their regional language, and even then only the vernacular versions.
So a gori’s comfortable use of the languages really, REALLY intrigued me.
I was not aware of the Braj region and its hybrid languages so thanks for the info.
Nom Pakistan, thanks for the kudos but I’m not completely fluent in Bengali or Sanskrit or Hindi. I know some of all three.
I’ve been to West Bengal about a dozen times and that is usually where I try to immerse myself in bangla bhasha. I found it the easiest of the three to pick up. However, its the hardest accent to nail. Another thing I liked about bangla, even if you didn’t speak normal grammar, but rather spoke like a poem (where there is “poetic license” – was learning most of the language from padas and kavitas)the people still “got” what you were saying and liked it.
Still, that accent…… i love it, but its hard. Very different from the tones and inflections used in hindi. All those a’s that turn into o’s…..
That is incorrect. Braj is a spiritual center for vaishnavas, and holds a special place for Gaudiya Vaishnavas, as you pointed out, but I have traveled extensively in Braj, and interacted with villagers around the Mathura-Vrindawan- Barsana region. They spoke a dialect of Hindi which was largely comprehensible to me, and I don’t recall detecting any Bengali there. Perhaps you interacted with people of Bengali descent living in the region. As for the influence of the Bengali language on the literature of the region- well my exposure to Braj literature is limited to the poetry of Surdas and Bhartendu Harishchandra (and some of Meerabai’s verses) that we studied in school, and the numerous North Indian classical songs that I was made to learn (reluctantly at the time) as a child. And I have not come across any significant Bengali influence in them. Perhaps you could provide me with some links here- I might learn something new.
Braj bhasha is Hindi as Khariboli is Hindi. And all the dialects are derived from Sanskrit via Prakrits.
One request to all the gori/non-desi-language-knowing population – dont learn swear words because a) You need to say the bhen**** with a little fluency, you’ll just sound stupid and b) I use these words in public and you’ll understand them.
I’m not saying the locals speak a hybrid bengali/braj dialect in daily life (though at one point in time they may have, don’t) I’m saying braj boli poetry is something that arose from the admixture of bengli and braj bhasha. This was back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Probably only those who wrote those poems and songs spoke like that also. There were many kirtans written. Surdas, Mirabai and Harishchandra would not have done so, as they were not Bengali. A writer named Madhav comes to mind. Actually so many bengali padas contain Braj words. Don’t have my books in front of me and I doubt these works would be on the net, but you never know. You can google “vaishnava padavali”. I will as well.
“One request to all the gori/non-desi-language-knowing population – dont learn swear words because a) You need to say the bhen**** with a little fluency, you’ll just sound stupid and b) I use these words in public and you’ll understand them.”
haha. too late. (And I understand slang referring to women’s body parts too!) And I don’t say bahin… that’s just not right… bhai is much more fun! 😉
Lupus, its “braj buli” that I’m talking about, not “braj boli”. I knew it was close! And it started before the big bengali migration of Krishna bhaktas out of West Bengal to Braj region Uttar Pradesh, it started with the Bengali poet Vidyapati (pre-Gaudiya Vaishnava, pre-Chaitanya Mahaprabhu). So that tradition was carried on by many Gaudiya Vaishnavas who wrote in a similar hybrid style.
LinZi, you mean to say “bhai lund”????
From: http://people.du.ac.in/~tanmoy/bong_us.pdf
My understanding is that Braj bhasha or Braj boli was the original lang of the area, then later this mix called Braj buli came in due to the influence of the Bengalis. Rather, first the poet Vidyapati incorporated Braj into his bengali works and after the medieval pilgrim migration of Gaudiya Vaishnavas into the Braj region from Bengal, Braj buli took on a life of it’s own, in both more poetry and perhaps in a street sense too.
she did have some valid points. some of the naysayers stated that she assumed all desis speak hindi – at least once she asked if the bother person did, in fact, speak hindi. and that shopkeeper was bullshitting that he couldn’t understand what she was saying when, clearly, he did. and, perhaps this is not a great comparable, since i am desi, but i’ve found that nyc cab drivers love it when i speak in hindi to them (esp. after they find out my family’s from madras, which, admittedly,is a bit annoying).
i would, however, be interested in reading about the linguistic aspects of thinking entirely in a new language. also, considering just how different hindi is from english, i can’t say it’s unimpressive that she picked up hindi to the extent that she has.
i don;t know if she actually ascertained this, but one big advanatge of learning a desi language in a formal setting, rather than just being exposed to it orally, is the factor of reading and wroting. this is why i took tamil, despite being proficient. also, amardeep, it was NOT to meet boys – having boys in my tamil class actually made tings a lot more difficult for me 😉
Totally staged. Watch the camera angles in the cab. One from the backseat, one from the front seat. This means multiple takes or multiple cameras. Who scripted this stuff? “They don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan” ?? okay…sure. Is it supposed to make her look smart, or him dumb? Who in their right mind would consent to acting in this badly-scripted skit?
And why waiters, cab drivers, convenience store workers? Why not a group of grad students at NYU or an auntie at a puja? Way to perpetuate the stereotype, lady. And I’m not even going into moTi/moti. Or the way the camera came back to her in the restaurant and she was looking annoyed, like, “Where’s my free lAWsie?”
I only hope my Hindi is slightly better than that (did anyone else think she spoke Hindi with a French accent at the beginning?)
This has only made me never want to buy her book. I just can’t contribute money to something like this.
That video was awful.
Why should she even presume the Punjabi taxi driver would speak Hindi? As triliana mentioned, the driver seemed more an actor than a real taxi cab driver. His accent did not sound as someone from Punjab.
As the store owner wisely noted – they do not speak ‘Hindi’ (as ‘normative Hindi’ is understood) in Rajasthan. In the regions of Rajasthan bordering Punjab (where I have many family friends), north of Bikaner, they call their language ‘Rajasthani’.
“LinZi, you mean to say “bhai lund”???? “
Nope. I mean, instead of sister-thing and your mom’s that.. I enjoy switching it up for a nice brother-****er.
“As the store owner wisely noted – they do not speak ‘Hindi’ (as ‘normative Hindi’ is understood) in Rajasthan. In the regions of Rajasthan bordering Punjab (where I have many family friends), north of Bikaner, they call their language ‘Rajasthani’.”
I lived in Jaipur for a year… people speak Hindi there.. with it’s own Rajasthani flavor.. as in “mere ko” instead of “mujhko” for one example. But in addition to Hindi, people also speak Mewari and Marwari in Jaipur. In my experience a lot of northern states, like Rajasthan, Bihar, UP, Haryana… it is usually Hindi and/or another language like Bhojpuri, Mewari, etc. Though, of course, it depends on who you are talking to!
The great debate always becomes… what is Hindi, what is a dialect of Hindi, and what is actually a separate language?
That “chickens barking” thing she said was a pretty good analogy.
The problem is, she’s not only barking, she’s growling and snarling and challenging the alpha dog – she must be superior, right? Because it was HARD for a chicken to learn how to bark!
When you are learning anything – math, a language, a spiritual path, a culture of a people, you sit back, shut up, and let the teachers guide you. You are an empty vessel waiting to be filled up and should show some humility. One year of learning a language does not make you a linguistic expert, and challenging people who have spoken it all their lives, questioning their motives for speaking their native language, … is this not utter arrogance? And I nearly lost my lunch (ok, midnight snack) when she brought up Gujarat. Using riots, rape, and murder as a selling tactic for your book, particularly when your involvement was watching it on the news and maybe some heightened security in your city? Is it possible to stoop any lower?
This promo could have been done respectfully, humbly, with acknowledgement to the culture that hosted her for a year while she learned their language and their ways of life. Instead, it’s set up as a me vs. them – people who don’t want to speak Hindi with ME! people who don’t think MY face is beautiful – well they are also ugly, so they have no room to talk! and so on. and so forth.
People should proudly speak and learn to read and write their own regional languages…leistening to you lot, I have no interest in this woman’s book or view..The English have a word for her..Pratt
Talk Hindi To Me..No You talk Gujrati to me Beeeaacchh!
haha. too late. (And I understand slang referring to women’s body parts too!) And I don’t say bahin… that’s just not right… bhai is much more fun! 😉
Now that you’re in, please play along 🙂 . No need to rat people like me out, we’re simple people, like simple pleasures of life which primarily includes cursing in public. I just hope your accent is right, THE best accent for swearing is haryanvi/punjabi. Next are the UP people 😀
I never curse in Hindi. When you are flustered or angry, you generally revert to your native accent/MTI, and there’s nothing more hilarious than hearing someone screw up your favorite curse words. That’s NOT what you wish to convey when you use them. I guess if you hear it a lot you do pick it up – my accent’s great when I say dekho and shono in Bengali, but not when I say pretty much everything else – but I didn’t hang around people who cursed a lot around me, so no go on the gaalis.
Sometimes silence says it better anyway.
“I never curse in Hindi. When you are flustered or angry, you generally revert to your native accent/MTI, and there’s nothing more hilarious than hearing someone screw up your favorite curse words”
True true. While I can understand Hindi curse words and often use them when I am joking around, if I am really angry.. English curse words prove the easiest to access in my brain. Cursing in a second language requires more thought, and once you think about it, you’ll probably think… “maybe I shouldn’t be cursing right now..”
Anyways, I always feel like I am ‘bad’ when I curse in Hindi (arrey tum galiyan deti ho? chi chi) but feel perfectly confident in my abilities to curse at the appropriate time and place as needed in English.
In six months, Ms. Rich will have forgotten her Hindi and this thread will still be going.
PG is Pardesi Gori. Rahul slipped up. PG spotting is his favorite sport.
In six months, Ms. Rich will have forgotten her Hindi and this thread will still be going.
The sad thing is that outrage over Ms.Rich will not die down. There are so many other issues among desi’s in the west, that we need to be upset about, but instead getting too upset about something minor like this. Where I live, another desi women is fighting for her life and her 2 sons are dead after being killed by there husband/step father after yet another case of domestic violence against desi women who only recentley immigrated to the west[An issue much more important than this]. But I guess it easier to rally around the evil Ms.Rich and all the pain and suffering that she has caused the desi community.
Al Sharpton would be proud of the desi community after reading the comments here.
Suki, I agree with you..This is a bum string
Ha. Ha. Suki, you make me sukhi, sakhi! (assuming you’re a kudi, if not then “arey, bhai ka lund”!)
Like, duh!
No need to “spot” me, unless it’s at least a tenner, I’ve come out of the closet and been posting under PG and Pardesi Gori around here for the last week or so (on this and the punk thread, at least. Nobody spotted my aka’s on the other ones, slackers – you’re slippin’) However, I do find it interesting that over at this comments-closed-thread;
http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005828.html
…y’all thought I was LinZi (the girl crying out for non-arranged, inter-cultural lovin’ validation. ha. ha. Nope, I was there alright, but I’d bet a mil you’d never figure out which comment I made.
Muuwwaaaahhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!
Good night and god bless.
What’s the sport in identifying a commenter who comments as “PG” as Pardesi Gori? It’s like Dick Cheney on a caged quail hunt, spotting a cow on a Delhi road, or an Indian store-keeper in a 7-11.
hey Maitri, I think you’re wrong… this thread seems pretty over now
Has anyone looked at her website much? It’s funny that the links on the main page of her website are written in Devanagari, but there are some pretty obvious spelling mistakes. For starters, “udaaharan” is spelled उदाहरण, not spelled उदà¥à¤§à¤°à¤£. Does she not even have a dictionary? If not a dictionary, at least use Google’s translation or transliteration tools…That’s a pretty silly amateur mistake to be making if your book is being published.
Also, why is the title of her book written in a pseudo-Tamil font?
Yes, I did after watching the video. It is funny though.
I checked the wiki for Rajasthan and what the shopkeeper says is right. Rajasthani is spoken in Rajasthan not Hindi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajasthani_language
Hindi is an excellent link language for many of the North Indian languages but that does not mean every one in North India speaks Hindi.
Ponniyan Selvan: “I checked the wiki for Rajasthan and what the shopkeeper says is right. Rajasthani is spoken in Rajasthan not Hindi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajasthani_language“
Well, almost… it actually says Rajasthani/Hindi. And trust me, I lived in Jaipur for a year, completing an advanced Hindi program (the whole point was to be immersed in Hindi), people speak Hindi. In fact, I never spoke to someone in Jaipur in Hindi and had them NOT know Hindi. (Though I am sure that in some regions some people may know another language and not Hindi). One of my good friends/seniors from grad schools is from Rajasthan. He speaks Hindi and English. That doesn’t mean that people in Rajasthan don’t speak another language in addition to Hindi. Rajasthani includes all of the following dialects:
sorry about the name typo…
Sorry one last thing I wanted to point out about from the Rajasthani wiki..:
“Since 1947, several movements have been going on in Rajasthan for its recognition, but it is still considered a ‘dialect’ of Hindi. Recently, the Rajasthan Government has recognized it as a state language, but still, there is a long way for Rajasthani language to go. The reason is it lacks a comprehensive reference grammar and latest dictionary prepared based on a thorough linguistic survey of Rajasthan. Now an extensive descriptive grammar of Rajasthani is under process.”
Like I sort of mentioned earlier… there is always an ongoing debate as to what is Hindi, what is a dialect of Hindi, and what is technically a separate language. I think the whole language/dialect debate is still ongoing in linguistics in general, regarding languages/dialects (or whatever…) all over the world.
this blog is so out of touch with desi reality, it’s sickening to keep visiting it. it’s not like drugs though because for those there’s actually some temporary pleasure. clean up your act, you people. don’t be lame. 🙁
Thank you Amardeep for pointing this out, I thought I was the only one who was near-outraged by this. But I think everyone above me has said pretty much all there is to say.
As a white student learning Hindi after 1 year of Beginners, allow me to add the following things I know:
1) Slamming “heritage” speakers is ridiculous. Yes, there are some slackers in every language class, but by and large desi students taking Hindi are either speakers of other Indian languages with limited Hindi beyond Bollywood or a bit of conversation (thus they can hardly be accused of taking it because they already know it!) or Hindi speakers at home who already have some sense of the language and should not be looked down upon by some white person who labors over postpositions for 5 hours a night. Their Hindi, however slang-y or gramatically imprecise, will most likely always be better than hers.
2) People have commented on how bad her Hindi is, but I think that’s probably due to her age. Which is also why she got a book deal…middle-aged cancer survivor white woman learns Hindi for fun! Sounds great. Other gore log who study Hindi for professional reasons, from a younger age, and without the drama are quite common and not worth the attention.
But let me also say that HINDI IS A VERY EASY LANGUAGE TO LEARN!!!! This is what’s most amazing to me about all this – Hindi is an Indo-European language with relatively straightforward grammar and a vocabulary that ranks as “small” compared to, say, European languages (English, Russian) or Mandarin. It’s not tonal and there are no sounds that are truly difficult to make for a Western speaker. Even IF we take her story as “interesting,” learning Hindi is no fantastic achievement. I want to see Ms. Rich try out Kannada or Tamil or some tribal language from central India. I once met a guy in Berkeley who was doing volunteer garden work who claimed to speak 20 languages, including my own native language (Romanian). He wasn’t crazy: he actually gave me a few sentences in Romanian with near-perfect pronunciation. There should be a book about that guy, instead of this joyrider.
Rajasthani isn’t the only language Imperialists in Delhi have claimed as a Hindi Dialect…Punjabi has had that false notion thrusted upon it for ages..I have even heard it said ( may be false therefore) that partly why Rajiv Gandhi was killed , was a protest at Northeners trying to force Hindi on the southern population, whose languages are thousand of years old, and not 20th CEntury Gora inventions like Hindi
People knowing Hindi is different than people speaking in Hindi with everyone else. A Rajasthani may speak to you in Hindi but the issue is whether he speaks in Hindi to a fellow Rajasthani which I doubt. So what the shopkeeper said may well be right.
People in Punjab may know Hindi but that does not mean in Punjab people speak Hindi.
This is absurd.
Yes. And the remaining part was due to a conspiracy hatched by the illuminati, CIA, Punjab National Bank and Lund University to prevent him from disclosing the secrets of cold fusion, imparted to him by Chandraswami. Or so I have heard (May be false, therefore).
Dude, you need to get some education and/or some medications. Fairly soon.
“People knowing Hindi is different than people speaking in Hindi with everyone else. A Rajasthani may speak to you in Hindi but the issue is whether he speaks in Hindi to a fellow Rajasthani which I doubt. So what the shopkeeper said may well be right.”
I don’t think you can make it out to be as straight forward as that…. I think that is the case for many many places in India… there are SO many languages and so many dialects that many people can speak 3-4 languages. Living in a city like Jaipur, where there are people of Rajasthani descent, as well as many families that migrated during partition, as well as all the other people who may have come there for work, and you have a mix. Especially in an urban environment in North India (do people in Mumbai speak only Marathi, or is Hindi a dominate language as well?)
Hindi tends to be the default language for schools and so forth, and hence becomes the default language of educated people. (Which may not be the case for, for example, auto drivers). During my first some there, a classmate did a project on Marwari and Mewari (two dominate Rajasthani languages in Jaipur) and found many people such as shop keepers, auto drivers, etc that could speak one or the other. But this was a lot of mix, and it really depended on where people migrated from. While they may speak this language at home, I would hazard a guess that Hindi is probably spoken more often between people in a urban environment because it is more of a lingua franca. Then, people who grow up in this city environment tend to learn/speak the lingua franca while dropping the regional language dialect.
If you want to talk about rural language, then the case is probably much different. But I bet this lady didn’t live in a village. 🙂
And, additionally, I am also able to listen to conversations that I am not a part of, and I can definitely tell the different between Hindi and another language.
How tough are their entrance exams, and where can I sit for them?
Another white guy who has studied some Hindi and thought I would chime in here. I have to disagree with the guy from Romania who says that Hindi is easy. Yes it has fewer noun cases etc. than some European languages, but speaking idiomatically is another story (all those expressions ending in lagnaa, chalnaa, etc.) Also, I have to disagree that the pronunciation isn’t that hard. In my mind I understand the different d’s, t’s, and r’s, but the mouth doesn’t always cooperate. In any case, I only speak it occasionally when I meet Indian people at parties etc. and after finding out if it is their native language and sort of feeling out if they might be interested in exchanging a few sentences. Especially since I’m not that good I know that a little of this can go a long way, so I always knock it off after a minute or two, even though I’d really like to practice more some time. When I do this in a friendly way, I’ve always gotten a good reaction from people (meaning an amused laugh, a “hey that’s not bad” sort of thing.) I never try to act smart or suave or expect people to be blown away or anything, and usually I find them pretty receptive.
Having said that, I have to say i feel a bit sorry for Ms. Rich. She clearly seems a bit desperate for people to like her. Still, I can sort of understand the reactions of some of the people here. For instance, I would never dream of speaking to a Hispanic cashier in Spanish (another language I am okay but my no means good at.) And even though it is much rarer for someone to know even one word of Hindi (last I checked “Teach Yourself Hindi” wasn’t exactly at the top of Amazon’s bestseller list), I can still sort of understand.
What? What the? What?
I couldn’t believe this video. First of all, somebody teach her to pronounce Hindi correctly. (Not a hard ‘d’ a soft ‘th.’) Wow, she’s annoying.
@LinZi and Ponniyin,
i am not certain how much hindi/ hindustani / marwari is spoken in rajasthan, or whether hindustani or marwari is a dialect of hindi or not—in all probability you both know more about it. but if i may say so—both of you definitely speak the real national language of india—an intangible, unnamed language where negations of true statements still remain true :).
but to weigh into the matter unsolicitedly, the argument may have something in common with a budding question on the dialects of kannada. coastal kannada is different from the literary/mysore version, but today they are close enough to be dialects. however there is definitely a trend in tuluization/konkanization of coastal kannada—in a few decades, perhaps there will be an argument whether the coastal version is kannada or not.
is it possible rajasthani / marwari is in that situation? i mean, people may understand and be comfortable in both, but there may be sufficient deviation already that some are uncomfortable classifying rajasthani as a dialect of hindi. i know some of my marwari friends in bangalore would never accept they spoke hindi at home. others with the same mother tongue would say they spoke hindi at home—they are probably both right to some extent. after all, language is fluid, isn’t it?
“i know some of my marwari friends in bangalore would never accept they spoke hindi at home. others with the same mother tongue would say they spoke hindi at home—they are probably both right to some extent. after all, language is fluid, isn’t it?”
Yes. That’s my point. It is fluid and.My point was not that people don’t speak Rajasthani languages/dialects/etc in Rajasthan, but at the same time you can’t say “that shopkeeper was right when he said they don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan”. It’s not one or the other, its not this or that, and especially in urban environments like Jaipur, Hindi is a very important language.
I mean, take Mumbai as the super-example. In a state were Marathi is spoken, a city full of immigrants from all over the country, then add in preferences for education. In the case of Mumbai, English comes out to be a big winner, Hindi is a language you can use, Marathi as well, then you can probably find people in the city to speak just about any Indian language with due to migration.
Jaipur is like a mini-version of that. English is not a dominating language like in Mumbai, (one of the reason a Hindi language program would choose Jaipur for a Hindi immersion program) rather Hindi comes out as the big winner in terms of communicating to everyone else. Besides that, we would have a mini-version of Mumbai… we have people speaking Hindi, people speaking all the Rajasthani languages, and all the people from other states who speak (or spoke, depending on how many generations they have lived there, and how their family kept up various languages) a different language, such as Punjabi. (There are a lot of Sikhs in Jaipur who came during Partition.)
I think it’s hard to properly describe language situations in a lot of places in India, especially urban environments, because it is not simple and it is not black and white. It’s much easier to say “In the rural village of Blah-Blah in Gaya District of Bihar, people speak Bhojpuri”.
There are a lot of factors to consider– loyality to regional languages, language of education, make-up of population, interest and availability of English studies, and so forth.
So really it is very complicated and hard to pin down.
I agree with Chris that Hindi is not that easy of a language to learn. Pronunciation can be difficult, and while many of the sounds overlap, English lumps sounds together as one, where Hindi makes important distinctions between them.
Did you say pearl or fat? Did you say peacock or fold? Did you say food or one-eyed man? (haha, I love this one) Did you say sorry or sari?
Luckily context helps us poor saps when we make a bumbling error like announce “I ate a one-eyed man for lunch”, and immersion really help to train our ears and tongues for distinction between sounds.
Basic Hindi grammar is pretty easy, and I adore the Devanagari script for it’s scientific beauty and sensicalness, but when you get beyond basics, there are a lot of challenges. Idioms are difficult in any language, and more complicated grammar can get confusing… such as Until..then.. (jab tak…tab tak)..
Linzi,
Jaipur is not Rajasthan and the shopkeeper is right in saying that in Rajasthan people don’t speak Hindi. If you want to generalize you should not pick a single city in a state and apply the generalisation.
An example is if the shopkeeper said “In Maharashtra people do not speak English”, Do you agree with it or not?.
I just saw the video now, while it is annoying there’s no shortage of Indians/Indian-American who amp up the desi-exotica to sell books that should never be published. Publishers have a heard mentality, South Asia is the flavor of the month and Ms. Rich is just gaming the system. The only thing beyond the pale is the implication that she was somehow in harms way during the violence in Gujurat.
Mircea: I doubt Hindi would be any easier to learn for a European than Tamil. The shared I.E. roots don’t count for much this far apart in the family tree, and to the extent that it does colloquial Indian Tamil (as opposed to classical/formal/ or Jaffna Tamil) in India has a lexicon that is probably over 50% Indo-Iranian in origin
“Jaipur is not Rajasthan and the shopkeeper is right in saying that in Rajasthan people don’t speak Hindi. If you want to generalize you should not pick a single city in a state and apply the generalisation.
An example is if the shopkeeper said “In Maharashtra people do not speak English”, Do you agree with it or not?. “
Ok, I can see I am not getting anywhere… Let me try one more time. If the shopkeeper said people in Maharastra don’t speak English I would say he is wrong, because there is a significant population of English speakers in the state.
My whole was that it is black and white. So if someone makes a black and white statement such as people don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan, then it is wrong due to it’s in ability to understand the various shades of grey that are really going on, as is the case with Hindi and Rajasthani languages in Rajasthan.
Done now. This is very circular. I think my point has been made rather clearly a bunch of times now.
Ponniyin, Rajasthani is a boli. Just like Haryanvi, Awadhi,Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri and several other dialects of the language we call Hindi. So, it is entirely correct to say that the dominant dialect of Rajasthan is Rajasthani (which is actually a language cluster), not Khariboli, which is a standard dialect mainly spoken in cities and as a language of governance. Now, in Awadh, they speak Awadhi, but you wouldn’t say that Hindi is not spoken in Lucknow district, would you? Or to take a UK analogy, say that in North England, the language spoken is Geordie, not English.
It is different with South Indian languages, as they have different origins, much different vocabulary and grammar and are independent linguistic rivers, while in most of the North Indian Hindi speaking region (the so called “BIMARU” states), there are numerous tributaries, and it is difficult to discern the dominant stream, so by convention, a standard dialect has been selected, and that is the one used for education and governance, and thus more likely to be heard in cities, and in media.